2024/08/06 19:04
Kulo producer Song Lun talks about "Singing Tide": As long as you can survive
2024/08/06 19:04
Finishing / Autumn and Autumn
"Before the launch of Rising Tide, many candidates would ask me about my long-term expectations for the game, and I would say that I would just survive."
At the end of July, Li Songlun, the producer of Kuluo Games, participated in the developer salon (TDW 2024) held by TapTap, and shared the operation ideas of "Ming Tide" before and after its launch, including why it made great strides to do global independent distribution, how to face the problems exposed when "Ming Tide" was launched, and so on.
At the salon, Song Lun said that the performance of "Ming Tide" has far exceeded the team's expectations in many aspects, but there are still some deficiencies and challenges in terms of word-of-mouth and ratings, and they will continue to explore the four aspects of content style, immersive experience, character building, and globalization in the future.
The following is a transcript of the speech, some of which have been edited to take care of the reading experience:
01
Hello everyone, I'm Solon Lee, and today I would like to briefly share with you the idea of the global operation of "Ming Tide".
The first is why we want to do global self-distribution.
In fact, in 2017, we were considering and independent distribution, and in the successive practice of "Zhan Shuang Pamish" (hereinafter referred to as Zhan Shuang) and "Ming Tide", we gradually clarified and strengthened this idea. It allows our team to hear the voices and feedback of our users in the most efficient way, knowing that this is a serious matter for players, and to implement and optimize it quickly.
In this way, what we do becomes more precise and efficient, and the results are naturally better.
In fact, I think that compared to the leap from action to open-world products, Kuro is much more conservative in doing independent distribution. It can be said that we have been thinking about self-development and self-development since the establishment of the project in 2017, but what makes us really feel that we have global spontaneous ability is when "Ming Tide" will be launched in 2024. During this period, it has been a long process of observation, learning, practice and mastery.
Why? Because at the beginning, we only achieved independent distribution of "Battle Double" in China, and many overseas markets of the game were handed over to other publishers. Later, when we felt that we had mastered the experience of domestic distribution, we also invested some manpower to learn overseas distribution, and discussed with our publishers: can we first give some overseas markets back to us for self-distribution.
"Battle Twin Pamish"
As luck would have were, overseas publishers have always been very supportive of Kulo's publishing work, and when we came up with such an idea, they were willing to return the game publishing rights to Kulo and let us do it ourselves.
By this year, we have gradually taken back the overseas distribution rights of "Battle Double" and entered the stage of global spontaneity. In the future, Kulo's better state may be that its two games are all self-developed and self-published, opening up the publishing experience, learning from each other and complementing each other, and achieving a spiraling long-term effect.
The second is why we want to make the same version in the world.
I had a very strong feeling when I was working on "Battle Double": the most important thing for content games is to sell content, and content is time-sensitive.
But if you can't achieve the same version in the world, then overseas users and users with a later version will wear out part of the experience due to the timeliness of the content, for example, the content of the game was made two years ago, but they only played it two years later, then whether it is the freshness of users or the user feedback we collect, it is untrue and misplaced - so I think the content game must be the same version in the world.
The game's official YouTube page
In addition, not being able to make the same version in the world is also a waste of energy and enthusiasm for R&D.
When we were working on "Battle Double", we needed to invest some manpower in the overseas version transportation and localization, so I was very touched: these overseas students would basically come to me every six months and ask me, saying that they didn't know where their future direction was.
This problem is very painful for me, I feel that they have spent a lot of energy and enthusiasm on the content that is delayed, maintaining the past versions of the game, and not feeling the joy of making content.
So, wouldn't it be better if everyone was focused on making content? I think the answer is yes. Therefore, when I was working on "Singing Tide", I also made it clear that I would devote all my manpower to making content, and try to do as little delayed and ineffective branch work as possible.
02
Before doing this sharing, I took a look at the situation of "Ming Tide" on TapTap, and now it is close to 8 million downloads and a rating of 6.3, but in fact, when "Ming Tide" was launched, the rating on TapTap dropped to 5.3 points, but now not only the rating has rebounded, but the number of global social media fans has also exceeded 10 million...... Seeing the current situation, especially in terms of downloads, streaming, and attention, I feel that "Singing Tide" has exceeded our team's original expectations.
But Kuro has always had very low expectations for the product, and every time I went to meet with a candidate for more than three years, they would ask me what my long-term expectations were for the product, and I would answer very firmly: just survive.
Because I think you need to stick to long-termism when making games, if the expectations are lower at the beginning, then when the product exceeds expectations, you will have a stronger belief and sense of accomplishment, and you will be more willing to stick to it.
Although Rising Tide exceeded our expectations in many ways, I still want the team to pay more attention to the parts of the game that are lacking, such as our low rating on TapTap, which is now 6.3 and only 5.3 on the server.
Why is the rating so low? I think there are a lot of things that need to be optimized for the game server, including localization, story experience, performance, backlog of tickets, too many bugs, content quality control, immature operation, etc.
As a big team, we have some methodologies to solve these problems efficiently.
For example, when "Singing Tide" was launched, players around the world gave us a lot of feedback in terms of performance optimization, and the pending tickets alone may exceed 100,000, which are quite scattered and difficult to quantify. Is it the most important? It requires some scientific methods to focus and monitor, such as whether there is a monitoring platform that can quickly analyze the performance consumption of all models in the world, every frame in the game, and different maps......
But to be honest, we didn't have much experience with this before, and after this battle, we also realized that we needed a better monitoring model to try to quantify the problem as much as possible in order to know how to do it most efficiently.
Another example is localization, which is not only about you catching a classmate who seems to have experience to be in charge, but also about the team's constant verification in practice. Therefore, when we develop the internal version, we will find a lot of users in overseas markets, try to participate in the localization of each version of our game, and see whether the translation of terms is accurate, whether the communication and understanding of both parties are consistent, and set up many special projects to solve these problems.
03
When it comes to the ideas and directions of the future, in fact, there is a creed of making products within Kuluo: insist on good gameplay + good content.
In terms of good gameplay, in fact, starting from "Battlefield Double Ponytail", to today's "Battle Double" and "Singing Tide", Kulo is trying to do some fun things that users have never experienced, such as the ballistic gameplay of "Battlefield Double Ponytail", the match-3 gameplay of "Battle Double", and the sound skeleton gameplay of "Singing Tide...... We hope to have a set of gameplay that allows users to play for a long time and always want to play.
Sound Skeleton gameplay
The second is good content. I believe that the products I make should not only be fun enough, but also have content and IP power, which can give players interesting stories, positive values and spiritual inspiration in the long run.
Speaking of "Singing Tide", its general idea of gameplay is divided into four parts: characters, big world, sound bones, and interaction.
The interaction is divided into two layers, one is the interaction between the user and the user, and the other is the interaction between the user and the world. For example, when players experience the game, they will feel that they have interacted with the characters and have a strong sense of substitution; For example, the player interacts with the changes in the world, and what actions he does cause the world to change...... The interaction between these two parts is the main direction we will focus on in the future.
As for how we can better combine these four tags, and then use the carrier of the core gameplay of the battle to break through, it is also something that our product wants to continue to explore in terms of gameplay in the future.
In terms of content, "Singing Tide" currently has the following four directions of planning:
One is more culture and style. Before I told you about the content design idea of "Ming Tide" - I hope to promote some of the cultural core and aesthetic preferences of Chinese to the world.
You will see that the world view of "Ming Tide" is quite huge, it is a story about the world and the universe of the tragic phenomenon, so in the future, in addition to the national style and the Chinese region, we also hope to present the appearance of "Ming Tide" in other countries and even other worlds to users through the annual major version update.
The second is how to continue to combine action, gameplay and script to bring users a more interactive and immersive gaming experience.
The third is to create characters that can move people more. Because in today's saturated content games, I think that the creation of a character cannot have weaknesses (flaws), so we must always think about how to plan character tags based on versions, determine the position of characters in the world view, and handle the relationship between characters, protagonists and players...... Make players more receptive to the way this character is portrayed.
The fourth is to more scientifically meet the content preferences of users all over the world. Because in the past operation of "Singing Tide", we found that the feedback and data of the same character in different markets around the world are different. For example, the first version of "Ji Yan", his data in China, Japan, and United States markets are very different. Therefore, in the future version, we hope to adjust the proportion of character design, the planning of the entire version, etc., according to the feedback of users of different characters, so that users around the world can better accept the game.
Finally, let's talk about how we have felt since we made "Singing Tide".
First of all, we think it's really cool to do open world and global distribution. The open world is a box, and everything can be loaded into it, which is a good incentive for our R&D team, for example, if you think something is fun, it always has a way to appear in the open world reasonably, which can not only bring users a different experience, but also give our team more R&D possibilities - the open world is a good guarantee for the long-term operation of the product, users, and teams.
In addition, I often say within the team that I hope you will do a good job in supporting long-term content service games, not only with scientific methods, but also with the right mentality: love players, love games, and love teams, and only in this way will you be engaged in the cause of games for a longer time.
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